William Clarke was a pastoralist and landowner who was widely feared for his ruthless land hunger but respected for his ability to generate a fortune.

The English-born businessman arrived in Van Diemen’s Land in 1829 and quickly set about obtaining land in the colony from a humble butcher’s shop to owning more than 80,000 acres and renting 50,000 acres on the isle by 1853.

He saw great value in livestock and never meddled with agriculture opting to raise sheep and cattle as a ‘better paying game’. To his great profit, he introduced the Leicester breed of sheep into Australia.

The gold rush further increased his prosperity; meat sales boomed; money received from his wool clips he lent at high interest to Australian import houses, and in time he acquired the reputation of being the wealthiest man in the country.

Such was his landholding around Marnong, north of Melbourne, his property extended from Sunbury to Sydney Road.

Clarke was a member of the Victorian Legislative Council in 1856 to 1861 and again from 1863 to 1870.

He was a director and substantial shareholder in the Colonial Bank and had large interests in other banks and insurance companies. His health declined and in 1870 he became partially paralysed but insisted on attending directors’ meetings although it took four men to carry him to his carriage.

He died in Melbourne on 13 January 1874 leaving an estate of £2,500,000 and more than a million acres of land across Australia and New Zealand.

Thomas Colclough was grazier who bought WJT Clarke’s section of Bank Vale in 1863 and named it Green Grove.

Over the next 15 years he increased his holding in the area from some 846 acres to 1000 acres and was said to be ‘often in the (stock) yards as he handled both sheep and
cattle’.

In September 1877 a notice appeared in the Argus in which architect Robert Adamson invited tenders for extensive additions to the homestead which was the front section and the remodelling of
the original bluestone buildings.

Colclough died in 1897 and the property was sold.

Arthur, the nephew of Australia’s greatest cattle baron Sir William Angliss, managed the family’s massive pastoral empire for almost 20 years after his uncle’s death in 1957.

Following the death of Sir William, Arthur was appointed chairman and managing director of 11 pastoral stations spread across 50,000 square kilometres and carried more than 300,000 cattle and several thousand horses.

In the 1930s, Sir William had the biggest personally controlled meat empire in the British Empire, and by 1950 he was reputed to be Australia’s richest man.

Arthur bought Marnong in 1935 and, with his wife Elma, transformed it into a family home and farm. Over the next 20 years, Arthur’s hard work resulted in reclaiming the property from the ravages of rabbits and soil erosion by introducing netting fencing and contour furrowing.

More than 10,000 rabbits were poisoned annually, until they were eliminated.

With pasture improvement and fertiliser, the carrying capacity was increased five-fold, and Arthur took great pride in topping the averages at Newmarket saleyards with his fat lambs and bullocks.